T-Online will evolve on new-generation digital delivery platform

Germany’s biggest news portal has chosen a cloud-hosted solution based on EidosMedia’s Cobalt platform to reach its audiences through multiple channels from web to voice interactive.

News portal t-online.de is Germany’s largest with over 27 million unique visitors generating over 900 million page views per month. The portal’s owners, Ströer Digital Publishing GmbH, have chosen Cobalt, the advanced digital delivery platform developed by EidosMedia, as a basis for its future evolution.

The portal reaches its audience of over 47 million people through a wide range of channels and devices from its main website www.t-online.de to mobile apps, voice devices such as Amazon Alexa and digital street displays in many German cities.

Originally created in 1995 by Deutsche Telekom as an ISP, t-online.de was acquired by the Ströer media company in 2015 with the aim of developing it into Germany’s most relevant digital media brand by establishing the portal as a solid source of national and international news as well as entertainment and lifestyle content.

As their news brief expanded, t-online.de became aware of the limitations of the content management system they were using.

“Our journalists needed more flexibility and velocity in the inclusion of images and other media and Cobalt will allow for a more fluent story composition,” said Dr. Florian Harms, Editor in Chief of t-online.de. “In addition, producing real multimedia stories should become a lot easier.”

Cobalt’s mobile user interface works on any device from PC to smartphone and will allow t-online.de staff to create and manage their content from any location with a network connection. The powerful editing workspace allows staff to create complex multimedia stories and preview them in real time. They can search and post to social media from within the workspace, using automatic tools and shortcuts.

“We expect significant gains in both speed and quality of editorial output,” said Dr. Harms.

Portal managers will be able to optimise the response and usability of the site using Cobalt’s built-in tools for A/B testing and engagement assessment, as well as easy integration with third-party analytics apps.

The ‘future-proofing’ of the t-online.de project will be assured by Cobalt’s extreme flexibility. “Cobalt’s delivery capabilities can be extended by simply plugging in any standard output module – including third-party and open-source,” said Jörg Drees, EidosMedia Director Marketing and Business Development DACH region. “This will allow the platform to evolve to keep up with new technologies and audience trends.”

The t-online.de solution will make use of a cloud installation of the Cobalt solution hosted jointly between Amazon Web Services and EidosMedia’s ‘private’ cloud in Frankfurt, Germany. “The cloud hosting plus the web-based interface (no software to install or maintain on users’ devices) makes this an ultra-light solution from the customer’s point of view – maximum performance with zero hardware footprint,” said Jörg Drees.

The Cobalt platform will serve 60 users based in t-online.de’s Berlin newsroom.